Far away from our shores … in NEPAL, ….There, too, voices of dissent towards animal cruelty are rising … Inevitably, things will change. They make take time. But change, there will be. The same way that change took place in the way people thought about black slavery.

Even in Nepal, people are becoming conscious about the needless crueltly inflicted on animals before they are killed for the consumption of their meat.

A respected botanist, Dr Tirtha Shrestha says that in Bhaktapur, near Kathmandu, pigs are skinned alive and their beating hearts offered to the temple, while in a nearby village people tear apart a live goat.
He asks what kind of people take pleasure in such cruelty, even suggesting that a society which treats animals so brutally will be brutal to human beings too.
"Decapitating a bleating buffalo or goat should not be the symbol of the Nepali civilisation," he says. "Why are we exhibiting such cruelty, and how does this reflect on our society?"
Dr Shrestha accepts that to eat meat, animals must be killed.
"But why do we have to inflict such pain before we do so? This is not just inhuman, it is also against the law in many countries. It is morally wrong to torture fellow creatures under any circumstances, but to do so in the name of religion is a sin."

Dr Shrestha should be told that in supposedly-western countries, animal cruelty also takes place in the process of animal slaughter for human consumption. I have seen videos of what happens at the Malta slaughter-house and I can vouch for the fact that animals, yes, are killed while their hearts are still beating. Certainly, in Malta, as in other countries, animals are slaughtered unceremoniously, without any dignity, with much cruelty.